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Ah, this article brings back some nice memories of Christmas in 1993 and receiving Myst as a gift[1]. I was dismayed it required a CD-ROM drive, which we didn'

Ah, this article brings back some nice memories of Christmas in 1993 and receiving Myst as a gift[1]. I was dismayed it required a CD-ROM drive, which we didn't have... except... hey what's this other gift? Our family's first CD-ROM drive! It was a momentous occasion! Nowadays CD drives are basically thrift shop throwaways, but back then they cost $hundreds and you were lucky to read at 4x speed. Fortunately, demo CDs suddenly became widely produced and it was easy to find huge libraries of neat new stuff to check out. Far more convenient than trying to download stuff at 1-2kB/sec over dialup! :'D [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/amatecha/9930279265/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/amatecha/9930279265/

ghaff 9y ago
Yeah. When CDs first came out for the PC, you could suddenly have all this neat digital stuff at your fingertips that was effectively not practical to download at any decent rate. You could also start getting photos scanned for the first time.
chiph 9y ago
> Fortunately, demo CDs suddenly became widely produced So many AOL CDs in the mail... I think my first drive was a 2x Plextor internal SCSI that used the caddies. Pros: Never a scratched disc. Cons: You had to acquire & deal with caddies.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I recall running into a caddie drive once. Effectively it was used like a tray drive, with a removable tray...
- amatecha 9y ago
  Hey, before that was AOL floppies which were great -- free disks to use! Just put some scotch tape over the "write-protect" hole in the disk! hahaha :)